Seven years after the start of production, Miriam Faßbender’s documentary Fremd (Foreign) has finally been released in Germany. Faßbender portrays two men from West Africa who try to make their way from Mali to Europe. Being stuck in Morocco and Algiers for years, the prospect of going to Europe recedes into the distance. Fremd is a contemplative, yet highly political observation of patience and optimism in the face of despair. I met director Miriam Faßbender in Kreuzberg to talk about her film.
If you’re a fashionable person in Berlin, you need to meet him, the master of quilted bags, skyhigh heels and apefur coats – Roman Vardijan is the person everyone would love to be close with, since he has the magic hand to get every vintage delicacy you can dream of. Most of his energy goes into the elaboration of his ever upgrading stock of collector’s items Chanel, Alaia, Alexander McQueen, Céline and Japanese Avantgarde designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. The good thing is – he’s not about keeping those gems to himself, he deliberately shares them with the vintage hungry crowd in his innovative Nightboutique, offering themed selections of exquisite vintage clothing in sassy decorations after sunset.
There’s a science behind the ideal summer jam: it needs to be peppy, silly, and catchy. Dena’s genius “Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools” hits all our buttons, but it was the fantastic fleamarket-set video that really made the internet sit up and hit replay again and again. It was high time StilinBerlin’s music expert Florian Duijsens met this Bulgarian artist to talk about just how she pulled off writing 2012’s perfect summer jam.
After a few too many months of filming, I’ve finally finished this video portrait of Martin Niklas Wieser, the South Tyrolian-born (that’s Italy, not Austria) designer who’s been working in Berlin since 2006.
Something’s going on in the long neglected restaurant scene of Prenzlauer Berg. At the same spot where David Macé recently tried but failed to get Berliners to like his Pink Flamingo Pizza that worked so well with the Parisians, the French Julien Ponthieu and the Belgian Olivier Lapeyre opened a new French bistro-restaurant and called it Les Valseuses.
